It occured to me recently that most small women (like myself) almost always carry a small weapon for obvious reasons. While my baby Glock is a great technician, I'm thinking a piece along the lines of Felicity Shagwell's would actually be a much better deterrent. And, the laws being what they are, I'm more interested in deterring than shooting.

It occured to me recently that most small women (like myself) almost always carry a small weapon for obvious reasons. While my baby Glock is a great technician, I'm thinking a piece along the lines of Felicity Shagwell's would actually be a much better deterrent. And, the laws being what they are, I'm more interested in deterring than shooting.

It appears to be a 4-inch barrelled revolver, possibly a Smith and Wesson Combat Masterpiece or Combat Magnum- it's a bit difficult to tell if it's nickel-plated or stainless, and it might even be one of the larger magnum revolvers built on the larger *N* frame, such as *Dirty Harry's* well-known Model 29 .44 magnum, better suited to an Eastwood-sized San Francisco cop that to Ms. Graham's more compact but curvier bod. A pre-sellout used S&W M66 stainless .357 would seem a close starting point, but I'd have to review the movie to tell for certain- my glasses were broken the night I saw the film with friends, so I missed a detail here and there.

You're wrong about at least some smaller-stature women in chosing hardware from much of what I've seen, however. The most common reason for going to smaller handguns seems to be in hopes of finding a handgun well-suited to the smaller and daintier female hand, but that's not always the case. My own female partner through the days when Ms Felicity would have been at it was fond of the 9mm Walther P.38 military service pistol and noted that it was not only as easy to carry in her purse as a smaller shootin' iron, but was easier to find in a hurry amidst all the other jun- necessities she kept in there. Likewise the wife of an Illinois State Cop pal not only herself carried a duplicate of her hubby's 9mm M39 service pistol, but carried 4 extra magazines for the two of them in the external pockets on her purse's outside. And I lost a fine old well-worn .45 Colt Combat Commander as a gift to a former co-worker upon her enlistment and subsequent commissioning as an officer and rotary-wing pilot and felt less bad about the loss after later hearing from her that it was the handgun she carried during her tour during the Gulf War. Not only can women get away with larger hardware carried aboard the steamer trunks that some use for purses, but since shot placement is not necessarily as critical with the more serious artillery, many concerns about less-than-perfect shot grouping become less worrisome so long as the target is at least generally centerpunched.

But a couple of other Felicity carry pieces are possible, and were I in her platform shoes, I can think of a couple that would work, though maybe not *pure* 1960s vintage.